


For the Best

by Inquartata (mackillian)



Series: Tessera [4]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Best Friends, F/F, Humor, Mutual Pining, Not so secret crush, Original Character(s), Thaia swears a lot, Unresolved Sexual Tension, especially when she's flustered, g;ameblog prompt, that's why it's M and not T
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 07:40:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14468049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mackillian/pseuds/Inquartata
Summary: Thaia usually doesn't have a problem interacting with Lexi, but this isn't one of those days. (Takes place sometime during the main events of Tessellation.)





	For the Best

If Thaia had known her day would involve a series of events that took her back to her awkward post-adolescent stage, she would’ve stayed in bed. But she hadn’t known, so she’d gotten up. Too early, in her opinion, and why the fuck was Liam so energetic and noisy in the morning? Granted, he was energetic almost all the time and strongly reminded Thaia of exhausting younger asari maidens like Peebee. Or, Thaia supposed, what she’d probably been like at ‘a hundred and change.’ Insufferable came to mind, mostly because Thaia’s older sisters had claimed she was.

They might not have been wrong.

Her newfound empathy didn’t stop her from telling Liam to quiet the fuck down or she’d put him in a stasis and not feel sorry about it at all.

Drack asked her to do it anyway. There were reasons why Thaia got along so well with Drack and their tacit agreement for silence in the early hours was one of them. There’d been more than one day where she and Drack hadn’t exchanged a single word for the entire morning, and that was perfectly acceptable to both of them. Since she liked Drack better, Thaia opted for the stasis. 

The fucking moment her biotics coalesced, Lexi said from the corridor, “If you put Liam in a stasis, I will use my biotics on you and I won’t be nice.”

Well.

Thaia’s mind went _places_ that her mind should not have gone because while she knew what she could do with biotics, she didn’t know what Lexi could do with biotics and Thaia had a really good imagination. Except that imagination wasn’t supposed to be imagining things that sent that tingle up her spine because Lexi was her friend and you didn’t imagine those sorts of things with friends. Not even best friends. Or especially best friends. Whichever. 

Then Thaia realized two things. One, it was finally quiet. Two, it was finally quiet because everyone was staring at her. “What?”

“You haven’t said shit for five minutes,” said Drack.

“I was weighing my options.”

He patted her on the head. Patted her on the head like she was a nubby-crested child. “Sure you were.”

It was like Drack knew where her mind had gone. Given that he was so old that dirt made fun of other dirt by saying ‘you’re older’n Drack,’ he sure as shit knew.

Then Ryder was up and loud and for some reason incredibly excited about whatever thing she’d agreed they do on Kadara. For Ryder, excited meant talkative. Enough that Peebee— _Peebee_ , of all people—reminded Ryder to breathe once in a while and she shouldn’t be that excited about some old ship. 

The reason why Ryder was going: Avela Kjar had told Ryder that there were more ancient angaran relics and then had asked if she could find them. The reason why Thaia was going: Ryder had told Thaia that those relics could be additional ancient angaran ships and they would probably have star charts and shit. Thaia, the not-so-cleverly-disguised aerospace engineering nerd that she was, had readily agreed to go. The prospect of another old Heleus Cluster ship made the noise almost tolerable. Soon enough, Ryder was telling them to get prepped.

Thaia went to check her armor and weapons, which she’d secured in the smaller armory connected to the Tempest’s airlock when she’d first boarded the ship. At the time, it hadn’t seemed like it could possibly turn into something she’d regret. She’d been wrong.

When Thaia stepped onto the bridge, she practically ran into Lexi who, Thaia surmised after hearing the tail end of Lexi’s conversation with Suvi, had been following up with Suvi after Suvi’s alarming allergic reaction from the day before.

Suvi had licked a rock. Thaia would’ve been more surprised that anyone would actually do it on anything less than a triple dare, but the Armali University astrophysics department had shared a hallway with the geology department, so Thaia and the rest of the astrophysics students hadn’t been strangers to the incomprehensible things geologists did in the name of science. As it turned out, licking rocks wasn’t as far up on the list of those incomprehensible things as one would think.

As for Thaia, Lexi was close enough to place her hands on Thaia’s shoulders, which she did. Her simple action prevented Thaia’s potential evasion of Lexi’s usual reminder for Thaia to get her immune-boosting shot. Thaia usually tried to avoid the reminder because _shot_ , and because if Lexi asked—especially if the request was accompanied by physical touch—Thaia couldn’t say no.

Now that Thaia thought about it, Lexi probably knew because sometimes it was like Lexi knew Thaia better than Thaia knew herself.

Goddess-dammit. She’d literally walked right into Lexi’s clever trap. Some commando she was.

“You haven’t forgotten that you’ll need to stop by medbay to get your shot before you go to Kadara, have you?” asked Lexi. “Emphasis on before.”

“I promise I will.”

Then, as if to illustrate why Thaia couldn’t say no to Lexi even if it meant getting a shot, Lexi smiled at her. That was all. Smiled and then continued off the bridge like a normal person.

Thaia turned to head into the armory and missed the door. Missed the fucking door _,_ meaning she walked smack into the wall next to it hard enough to send her stumbling back a few steps.

The last time she’d walked into a wall, she’d been all of twenty-five years old and had grown fifteen centimeters during the year prior, which had made her gangly and awkward and there’d been that one day when she’d tripped seven times in the space of twenty minutes. 

But she couldn’t use that as an excuse because _this_ instance had resembled the many instances that had taken place between the ages of thirty and fifty—asari post-adolescence was a harrowing adjustment period—when she’d notice a pretty asari and said pretty asari noticed her and, well. She’d promptly walked into or tripped over anything and everything, and her sisters had been merciless whenever it happened. Because sisters were like that and, now that she thought about it, so was the Tempest’s crew. None of this had been a concern before because she was centuries past post-adolescence and shouldn’t have to worry about things like walking into shit when a pretty asari smiled in her general direction. 

Something had to be wrong with her because Lexi was her best friend and she’d handled her best friend smiling at her without issue before.

To manage handling it without issue, maybe she’d had to force herself to not think about Lexi’s eyes and voice and how much she cared about people and tried not to show it. But how much she cared was right there in how her hands were deft and gentle when she helped someone, and then outside of that there was also how her lab coat emphasized her—shit, now she was thinking about it.

As she prodded at her tender face, Thaia hoped Kallo and Suvi had been too preoccupied with their duties to see her unfortunate encounter with the not-door.

“Are you all right?” Suvi asked.

So much for that. Fuck.

“I’m fine.”

“I can fetch Lexi for—”

“No! I’m fine. My dignity’s in pieces and my right to refer to myself as a commando will probably be rescinded, but I’m otherwise fine. I’ll just… be in there. Checking whatever it was I was going in there to check.” Because fuck if she could remember.

“If you’re walking into walls, I’m not certain you should be touching firearms,” said Kallo.

“I’m _fine_.”

She wasn’t.

Kadara was a bust. Well, Kadara was usually a bust, but this time the angaran thing that was supposed to be awesome and space-related was instead some sort of instrument. The musical kind, not the navigating-through-space kind, and so not interesting to Thaia in the least, especially not after Ryder said, “Hey, there’s an architect over there,” and before anyone else could inform her that it was only chilling and not hurting anyone who wasn’t stupid enough to run up and say hi and how about we not be those idiots for once, Ryder followed up with, “let’s go kick it into orbit.”

Because leaving things well the fuck alone wasn’t something Ryder did.

They booted the architect into orbit. In the process, Ryder took a glancing blow to the head from a flailing nullifier limb, flew a few meters through the air, and ended up face-first in a pile of dirt. The resulting black eye instantly got Lexi’s attention when they returned to the Tempest, which meant the rest of them postponed medical scrutiny by scurrying to various hiding places. Except it took all of fifteen minutes for Lexi to flush them out, round them up, and then subject them to the fussing they’d mistakenly believed they’d avoided. The downside was that Lexi was displeased. The upside was that Lexi had been displeased by their behavior and thus did not smile and Thaia was saved from any further incidents.

For a whole maybe two hours.

With the Tempest’s environment relatively subdued after the earlier excitement, Thaia decided research would be in order because research was a safe activity. Unless you were, say, a geologist who licked rocks and Thaia was not a geologist nor would she ever be one. Besides, Thaia wanted to research because Dr. Aridana had sent her some promising data about the low traffic Togessan system, which Thaia pulled up to display over the research table because who didn’t like looking at star charts and none of the other people in the room were using the display anyway. When she saw how quiet the system was because she may not have entirely believed Dr. Aridana, Thaia said, “Well, fuck me.”

In her usual tone of voice, without so much as looking up from the terminal she was using, Lexi said, “Not right now. We’re in public.”

Ryder, the only other person close enough to hear the exchange, let out a short, loud laugh.

Momentum alone kept Thaia talking a little longer before her brain stopped working. “I’ll need to visit the…” And there it went.

Jaal, summoned by Ryder’s laugh, stepped out of the tech lab to ask, “Have I missed something?”

Thaia couldn’t even manage an _of course not, go about your day, please just go because something is wrong with me_.

Then the door to the cargo bay opened to admit Drack, who took one look at Thaia and said, “Kid, are you blushing?”

She was. She was blushing like a fucking thirty-year-old but she was three hundred years old and a trained commando. Commandos didn’t blush because they were the ones who said the things that made other people blush. And yet. And yet she couldn’t even speak so it wasn’t like she could defend herself.

“It’s a nice color on you, honestly,” said Ryder. “Until now, I didn’t even know asari could blush.”

The glare Thaia sent her way was rendered useless by said blush. 

“What is this blushing?” asked Jaal.

Thaia wanted to die.

Then Lexi explained the biological mechanisms for blushing and why some species blushed and Thaia wanted to die some more.

Then more people wandered in because Lexi’s impromptu lesson had been detailed and thorough because Lexi couldn’t _not_ be detailed and thorough. Peebee and Suvi—as Peebee announced when they arrived—had been sent by Kallo to find out what was going on because Kallo Jath gossiped more than a flock of matriarchs in a Thessian guildhall. 

“You really are adorable when you blush,” said Suvi. “It’s like I can’t even remember you’re a commando.”

“Commandos usually aren’t ones for blushing,” said Cora.

Thaia decided that she wouldn’t teach Cora the fun ‘yank someone out of a biotic charge and you should see their shocked faces when you do it that shit is hilarious’ technique anytime soon.

It still took another ten minutes for Thaia to regain her ability to speak and by then it was too late. Every time she asked them to please fucking drop it, she earned herself another round of shit-giving.

At least it made her miss her sisters a little less.

In the cargo bay, hours past Thaia having remembered how to talk, she was innocently chatting with Gil about how they could make enough room to run a pickup skyball game because she’d found a method for modifying the rules so non-biotics could play. Then Lexi, who’d been speaking with Vetra about something Sid-related, commented on her way out of Vetra’s room that she’d played in her university days and wanted to be included. Thaia, who was walking toward the Nomad to evaluate how best to deal with it because it took up so much fucking space, assured Lexi she would absolutely be invited. Then Lexi smiled at Thaia again before she left.

Thaia took another step forward and ran her knee straight into a supplemental life support module Gil hadn’t yet installed in the Nomad, went ass over crest in the air, and then landed on the microthruster array Gil had removed from the Nomad in order to fine-tune it.

She was fairly certain ‘smashing it into tiny pieces’ didn’t count as fine-tuning.

“What,” Gil said from his vantage point on the catwalk above, “was that?”

Despite the scattered remains of Nomad parts digging into her chest in painful ways that, had she been on a date, would’ve swiftly ended said date in biotics and a _what the fuck is wrong with you have you never touched someone else’s breasts before_ , Thaia stayed right where she’d landed. “As soon as I build a mass relay, I’m going to shoot myself out of it, that’s what.”

“If you want, I can shoot you into the black hole. It’d put you out of your misery a lot sooner.”

“I’m not opposed.”

Gil folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the terminal behind him. “Tell you what. In exchange for total secrecy from me, you go get a new microthruster array to replace the one that’s in bits, grab a new SLS module casing while you’re at it, and then install both in the Nomad. You do that, and no one will know that a certain someone merely smiled at you and you tripped and fell so hard that you managed to dent the SLS casing.”

“Deal.”

But Thaia had to do it all herself because she couldn’t go through Vetra because Vetra would ask questions. Questions that Thaia didn’t want to answer for obvious reasons and questions Vetra would want the answers to for the same obvious reasons.

However, while Thaia could sneak off the ship and back on without being detected if she wanted to, she couldn’t sneak back onto the ship while lugging a large SLS case and microthruster array, using biotics to haul them or not. So of course Vetra was standing in the middle of the cargo bay when Thaia returned.

As soon as Thaia put the stuff down, Vetra started in. “Did you sneak off the ship?”

“Maybe.”

“What for?”

“To get the parts Gil needed.” Thaia borrowed a bag of tools from Gil and started the process of removing the guts from the dented SLS casing so she could cram said guts into the new casing. She also did not make eye contact with Vetra because that would be a fatal error.

“Why did you have to get those parts?”

“Because I broke the ones he had.”

“How did you break them?”

“I tripped over the module, dented it, and then landed on the microthruster array. It didn’t survive the impact.”

“You tripped over the SLS module?”

“Yes,” Thaia said with all the confidence she could muster, reaching for that special ‘go ahead, question me again and see what happens’ voice.

Any implicit threat Thaia had tried to convey failed and failed hard. Vetra didn’t so much as blink. “Why?”

What the fuck this was becoming an actual interrogation and Thaia broke. “Because I didn’t see it why else would anyone trip over anything and what’s with all the questions?”

Vetra leaned against the Nomad and peered down at Thaia for a long moment. “Is this related to the incident at the research table?”

“How about we work on the Nomad and not discuss any of those things?”

“You agree to take my side the next time Sid and I argue, and we have a deal.”

Sid was growing up. Sid would be fine. Thaia, however, would not if Vetra continued because Vetra had missed her calling as a prosecuting attorney. “Fine.”

Vetra waited until Thaia was crouched under the Nomad to offer her advice. “You know, you could just say something.”

Thaia straightened so quickly she bumped her head on the chassis. “No, I can’t.” Because what Vetra didn’t know was that Thaia and Lexi had already _had_ that conversation. Sort of. They’d been drunk at the time and their recollections hazy, but the ultimate decision had been to continue as they had been as friends because Heleus was dangerous and something about losing the other would be too painful, and there might’ve been some absurd statement from Lexi about her not caring about people—honestly, Lexi could probably forgo breathing easier than she could fussing—and there’d been something about comparing Lexi to a matriarch or a matron maybe and… there had been a lot of wine.

“I’m just having an off day. I’ll be back to normal interaction with my best friend tomorrow.”

“Keep telling yourself that.” There was a certain tone that older sisters took when they spoke with anyone they viewed as a younger sister, and Vetra had used that tone. Vetra loved that tone. Vetra wielded that tone like a weapon, and she almost convinced Thaia to reconsider. Then Thaia realized there wasn’t enough alcohol currently on the Tempest to give her the quad, so there wasn’t a point in entertaining it further.

Thaia scowled at the SLS module’s uncooperative rail that was supposed to just slide into place and auto-lock with a satisfying click. “What do you think gets me through days like this?”

Vetra reached over and hit the casing once with her fist and immediately following was the satisfying click. “Willful ignorance.”

“And you would be right.”

“You think you’ll have another day like this tomorrow?”

“I hope not. It might kill me.”

It would and it would be a mercy killing. So, when Liam strolled through the cargo bay and casually mentioned to Thaia that Lexi was looking for her, Thaia ditched Vetra and the Nomad repair and hid her ass in the random salvaged escape pod. There were risks and there were _risks_ and maybe she’d just sleep in the musty pod. Sure, she’d wake up surly and ornery, but she would’ve postponed a far too risky one-on-one conversation with her best friend in favor of safely having that conversation on a different day—which would be when she could string together coherent sentences. 

It was for the best.


End file.
